Atmosphere with clouds

[creative-brain]

Hi, I just pushed a new branch with improved atmosphere and water. I am now working on implementation of optional clouds. In the meantime you can check the changes I made and do some corrections if you want.

[Hoimar]

Thanks for the contribution, looks like some good changes. I'll have to review the code a bit.

License

The license file in the root folder seems a bit strange. What I have in mind would looke like this:

• license for this project at the top
• contributors below or in a separate file
• licenses of other works used for the project (btw, which work is licensed by Maujoe?)

Branches

You based the branch on the planet_collisions branch, which didn't yet see the bugfixes that master got recently, so it tends to crash. Does it crash all the time for you too? Not sure what the best approach is here:

1. cherrypick the fixes from master and leave the collisions branch until performance issues are fixed?
2. merge collisions branch into master already? I don't want user experience to suffer.
3. create a beta branch which merges both branches? That sound better to me.

Thoughts on graphics

Some remarks:

• atmosphere radius and density are very responsive, much better already
• "render priority" is a good keyword. Does it work now how you intended it to? Water is rendered after the atmosphere and thruster particles currently, that looks strange. Souldn't the priority be lower than the one of the atmosphere and particles?
• the atmosphere shader looks alright but suffers from Z-fighting at large distances. We may need to adjust the radius at high distances (like before)
• the atmosphere doesn't seem to be facing towards the sun yet
• there are intersections between atmosphere and planets. Not sure why this happens, may be Z-buffer or a too low radius
• and the best: it works with large planet radii as well, no glitches 👍

This became a small brain dump, so obviously not everything is directly related to your commit.

[Hoimar]

Alright, I tried to tidily integrate your changes and tweaked some settings. You can check it out on the atmosphere_with_clouds branch.
I think we could actually create a dev or beta branch with these changes and delete planet_collisions and atmosphere_with_clouds.

Edit: Moved all changes to dev branch, so we can use that for feature development.

[ultrazar]

I can't see nothing about atmosphere_with_clouds , but I already made a simple clouds.

2021-06-12.20-29-01_Trim_Trim.mp4

Should I make a Pull request with this?

[Hoimar]

Oh, it's the dev branch now, as I mentioned earlier (see also my edit above).

This looks good already, albeit a bit rough around the edges. You can of course make a pull request if you want, it may take some time until I can take care of these though.

[Zylann]

Hello, I saw this plugin integrated my atmosphere plugin, and I actually added volumetric clouds recently, alongside several new versions of the shaders that include light scattering similar to Sebastian Lague's atmosphere video.

However the planet plugin didn't integrate mine by just shipping it under addons/, instead it looks like only certain things were picked and moved in sub-folders so it's not possible to just get the new features by updating my plugin replacing the folder.